City of Detroit to launch $3 million program for entrepreneurs

No details have been released yet, but Mayor Mike Duggan said that Detroit City Council recently allocated $3 million from federal block grants to support the effort.

“What we are looking at is people who want to actually do business as entrepreneurs because one of the things that we know is that they are smaller businesses than they are larger corporations,” said City Council President Brenda Jones at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference. “We are looking at people who want to do business not just downtown but also in the neighborhoods. We are working that package together.”

To lead this effort, the city hired Jill Ford – no relation to the Ford family – under Tom Lewand, the group executive for Jobs and Economic Growth. Ford has spent the past decade working with entrepreneurs, from funding startups in Ghana to angel investing in Silicon Valley.

“We want to help entrepreneurs get started, to show local entrepreneurs how to apply for national programs,” Lewand said. “We’re just developing the program, but one idea is a lobby where people can come to one place and see what’s available.”

For example, there is a janitor in the Coleman A Young Municipal Building, he said, who runs a lawn businesses and whose wife has a home-based cheesecake company. They would like to expand and hire more people, but they don’t know where to go to capital and resources.

Helping businesses grow is critical, he added, because there are more than 30,000 entrepreneurs in the city who can be job generators. Many of them are sole proprietors, but if each of them got the resources to grow and hire three, four, five people, that could add a thousands of extra jobs.

The challenge for the new program will be to differentiate itself amongst the more than five dozen existing groups that provide entrepreneurial support services. But, Lewand said, there is plenty of room for the city to be the main convener of these groups, improve on what exists and add services in the gaps.

And the mayor sees the entrepreneurship program as a complement to his neighborhood-rebuilding efforts. As the Detroit Land Bank auctions off more abandoned homes throughout the city, he sees the entrepreneurship team helping to bring services and stabilize the community.

“What we are really thinking is this: As you fill in all the houses in East English Village, you’ve got a whole bunch of empty storefronts on Warren. We target our entrepreneurial efforts there. As you fill in the houses in the Marygrove neighborhood, we’ve got a bunch of empty storefronts on Wyoming. We target the entrepreneurial incentives there.”